MARCUS GARVEY’S VISION FOR AFRICA!ew article

As part of several activities world-wide; marking the centenary founding of the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League 1914 - 2014), Library Tamery – a Pan-African oriented bookstore based in Paris, on 28th September 2014, organized a discus by the re-known historian and anthropologist Dr. Runoko Rashidi, on Marcus Garvey’s vision for Africa.

He takes us back to the life, work and legacy of this great pioneer of Pan-Africanism. If we look at the struggle from Marcus Garvey’s time as Dr. Runoko Rashidi underlined in his discus, we can see that the Blackman (African) is still confronting the same problem as the case was 100 years back. The present day state structure in Africa we all agree is no longer a 21st Century actuality, we cannot continue with these States because it is taking Africa nowhere.

We cannot continue to do business this way. Globalization; obliges us to federate Africa in order to be able to impose our conditions and be heard in today’s world politics. This prompts one to ask the question Garvey asked one hundred years ago after travelling to the several Caribbean and Central American countries, as well as in Europe between 1910 and 1914 where he investigated the condition of Black people firsthand, Marcus Garvey spoke the immortal words that began his monumental movement the UNIA:

“Where is the Black man’s government? Where is his king and his kingdom? Where is his president, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared I will help to make them."